Tools
Making rotating sphere plots with Blender — Python’s Matplotlib is a very powerful tool to make publication quality scientific plots, but its main strength is 2D (and 1D - I guess, but never really tried that) plots. Matplotlib does offer some 3D...
The St Andrews Monte Carlo summer school — The St Andrews Monte Carlo Summer School or SAMCSS is a biyearly summer school that is primarily aimed at PhD students based in the UK, and has been organised since 2013. I have been involved...
File systems — As a very frequent user of computer systems, there are a lot of things about a computer that I simply take for granted. I do care a lot about how fast my CPU(s) execute my...
Resolving painful git merges — git is an amazing repository system that greatly facilitates the management of large, collaborative code projects. It can store a large number of source code files and their history, and allows separate developers to work...
The many ways to combine plots in Python — Making plots is one of the core occupations of many astronomers, and probably of many other scientists too. These plots are used throughout the various stages of actual research, from visualising data for personal interpretation...
Command line arguments — Command line arguments are very important, as they provide (initially) the only way for a program or script to interact with its users. True, a program or script could just read all its input from...
NumPy array basics — Python is the most popular analysis tool in astronomy, and has been for a while. It is a scripting language that ships with tons of powerful libraries for data manipulation, analysis and plotting, and forms...
SSH tunnels — This week’s post continues on the same theme as last week’s: SSH. Last week I discussed how to set up passwordless SSH, so that connecting over SSH to a remote computer becomes as simple as...
Setting up passwordless SSH — Secure Shell (SSH) is by far the most used protocol to provide safe network access to remote resources like HPC clusters or web servers. It has shipped with Unix based operating systems since forever, and...
How this web page works — The end of yet another busy week, so this week’s post will also be short. I will give a brief overview of how I experienced web development over the last two decades and outline how...
Graph decomposition — I previously mentioned space-filling curves and their application in scientific computing, and concluded that post with the remark that space-filling curves are actually not the best solution if you want to distribute some large computational...
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